Where Is Che Guevara Buried? A Bolivian Tells

By JON LEE ANDERSON

LA PAZ, Bolivia, Nov. 20

When Ernesto Che Guevara was captured as he led a small column of leftist guerrillas through the Bolivian mountains in 1967, the army that had hunted him down quickly resolved to wipe away the evidence of his Cuban-sponsored campaign to spread revoluti on across Latin America. Guevara, 39 and already a legendary figure of the radical left, and other prisoners were summarily executed. Argentine agents cut off his hands to check his fingerprints against the files in his native Argentina. Then Bolivian soldiers took his body to a secret burial place.

Its disappearance has led to endless speculation, especially in Latin America, where Guevara remains a hovering presence as a martyr to the ideal of social transformation. Now, after 28 years of silence, a retired Bolivian Army general who took part in the counterinsurgency effort and says he witnessed the secret burial has decided to disclose where the body lies.

"Enough time has passed, and it's time the world knows," the officer, Gen. Mario Vargas Salinas, said in an interview in the large garden of his walled home outside the city of Santa Cruz in Bolivia's eastern lowlands.
"Che's body is buried in a mass grave in Vallegrande," he said, referring to a provincial capital in the mountains about 150 miles southwest of Santa Cruz. "He is buried under the airstrip at Vallegrande." The Cuban Government has long sought to recover the body. Guevara remains the patron saint of revolution at a time when economic difficulties have produced social strains in Cuba, and even many Cubans who differ with the Government revere him.

But the issue is a delicate one in Cuban-Bolivian relations. Cuban diplomats have pursued a quiet campaign for the return of Guevara's remains but have met with little response from the Bolivian Government, which asserts that it does not know w here they are. For the Government here, disinterment could reopen a delicate domestic issue. Bolivian human rights groups estimate that as many as 150 suspected leftist activists remain classified as "disappeared," most of themdating from the right-wing military rul e of Gen. Hugo Banzer Suarez in the 1970's. General Vargas, who in 1967 was a 30-year-old officer based in Vallegrande with Bolivia's Eighth Army Division, said he was one of only three witnesses to Guevara's burial, and he provided the most detailed account to date of the episode. General Vargas said he believed that one other witness was still alive, a former noncommissioned officer whom he knew only by his surname, Ticona.

Sometime after midnight, in the early hours of Oct. 11, 1967, General Vargas said, he and a fllow officer, Maj. Guido Flores, received orders to accompany Ticona. Ticona drove a dump truck carrying the bodies of six guerrillas, including Guevar a, to Vallegrande's airstrip.
"Next he brought a tractor," the general said of Ticona. "He dug the mass grave, brought the dump truck with the cadavers, dumped the cadavers, then brought the tractor and smoothed it over." Guevara, who was trained as a doctor in Argentina, joined Fidel Castro's small band of revolutionaries in Mexico in 1955. In the guerrill struggle that followed against the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, Guevara became the rebel army's first militar y commander. After the victory of Mr. Castro's rebel movement in January 1959, Guevara was considered the most second most powerful man in Cuba. A committed Marxist-Leninist, he is considered to have been influential in Mr. Castro's alignment with the Soviet bloc a nd the new Cuban Government's subsequent confrontation with the United States.

Guevara was most passionate about what he perceived as the need for Cuban support for guerrilla movements in Latin America and Africa. Eager to return to the battlefield, he organized a guerrilla expedition to Argentina in the hope of eventually leading the struggle there himself, but in early 1964 his advance party was discovered and most of its members were killed or captured. Guevara disappeared from public view and in 1965, when he left Cuba to assist one of the rebel factions fighting in the former Belgian Congo, now Zaire. But his army was routed. Later Guevara secretly returned to Cuba to prepare for a new guerrilla cam paign in Bolivia. Shorn of his customary beard and beret and disguised as a middle-aged Uruguayan economist, Guevara entered Bolivia in November 1966 and was joined by 50 or so Cuban, Bolivian, Argentine and Peruvian guerrillas at a base in southeastern Bolivia's tropic al desert. There, he intended to train guerrillas from several countries to touch off a "continental revolution."

But Guevara's effort was troubled from the outset. Bolivia's pro-Moscow Communist Party, on which he depended for backing, withdrew its support. This was folowed by desertions, betrayal to the army by suspicious peasants and the capture and dea th of key members of his band. And combat losses, sickness, fatigue and demoralization took a heavy toll. Alerted to Guevara's presence in Bolivia, Washington sent Special Forces experts to train a Bolivian battalion in anti-guerrilla techniques. Sever al agents of the Central Intelligence Agency were sent to assist in intelligence-gathering.

On Aug. 31, General Vargas, then an army captain, led an ambush that wiped out many of the guerrillas. He was promoted to major for his efforts. Guevara was captured on Oct. 8, 1967. He was held overnight in a mud-floor schoolhouse in the hamlet of La Higuera, about 30 miles from Vallegrande, and the next day, on the orders of Bolivia's President, Gen. Rene Barrientos, he was executed. General Vargas, who met Guevara's executioner afterward, said his final words were: "Shoot, coward! You are going to kill a man." Guevara's bullet-riddled body was flown to Vallegrande, and throughout that afternoon and the next day, Oct. 10, it lay on public display in a hospital laundry house. Hundreds of townspeople filed past for a glimpse, and photographers took pictures.

Local women said Guevara bore an uncanny resemblance to Jesus and snipped lockets of his chestnut-colored hair as keepsakes, said Susana Osinaga, a nurse who helpedbathe and embalm the body. On the night of Oct. 10, the military ended the public spectacle by sealing off the hospital. The Bolivian Government had decided to "disappear" Guevara's body, apparently to deny him a burial site that culd become a place of public homage. But first, mindful of the lingering disbelief in Cuba and elsewhere at the reports of his death, steps were taken to preserve evidence of his identity. General Vargas said he witnessed the grisly events that followed: the making of a wax death mask of Guevara, the amputation of his hands by Argentine agents and his nighttime burial.

The hands and death mask were later smuggled to Cuba by a Bolivian journalist on behalf of Bolivia's Interior Minister, Antonio Arguedas. Mr. Arguedas, whose motives remain unknown, later defeted to Cuba, and eventually returned to Bolivia. Today, the death mask and amputated hands are kept in an undisclosed location in Cuba, while Guevara's captured campaign diary remains in the vault of Bolivia's Central Bank. For decades, conflicting versions have suggested that Guevara's body was dropped into the Bolivian jungle from a helicopter, buried or cremated. But until now, no officer who was involved in the campaign agast him has offered a credible account.

Speaking of his motives for breaking his silence, General Vargas said he felt it was time that Bolivia and Cuba settled their remaining differences. "If the Israelis and Palestinians can make peace," the general said, "why can't we?" GRAPHIC: Photo: A retired Bolivian Army general has lifted the veil of mystery surrounding the burial place of Che Guevara. The leftist guerrilla leader's body was displayed after he was killed in October 1967.

(© New York Times / Associated Press)